38 - Animated infographic line chart - Track Matts

Hey, welcome to some infographics. We're going to start with the line chart. And it's kind of time to get the stuff we've already done. I am just going to show you how to do it. In this case we're going to use a mask to show how a line chart grows. The big trick here is that the line knows where it exists. So if you're watching loads, pretty much all animations do, either After Effects, or Edge Animate, any sort of animation program, it's a lot easier just to have the line exist rather than create the draft effects, like to build the line, using scripts physically. You just have the line already existed, and-- that's not the word-- but it already exists, and you reveal it. So let's show you how to do that.

Now, I've created the line graph in Photoshop. Now, you might-- Photoshop is probably not the greatest way to make a graph. I'll show you the two little parts here, there is this one here, and this one here. So, it's the line, and the background separated. That's what you need to get started. You can do this in Illustrator. Illustrator has its own graphing tool. And you can do it Excel, and bring that in, wherever, however you can make a graph, go off and do that. We're going to start with these two, so I'm going to import 'Line Chart 1' and 'Line Chart 2'. I'm going to make a 'Comp' from my 'Chart 1' because it's kind of like more of my background. And now, in Photoshop-- I'll just show you in here, whenever I'm working I just make sure that I'm using 'File', 'New'. And in here, this 'Film & Video', 'HDTV 1080p', and then hit 'New'. And these start off at the size that you need, and you can make your graph in here. Then it will match the size. I'm going to close all that down. Don't save. I'll leave a few resources for my computer. Photoshop and After Effects together are a strong combination. They kind of demand lots from your machine.

Anyway, I'm going to this one that says 'Fit'. Fills my screen, I'm going to go to 'Full'. Just to see it looking pretty. So I've got this, I'm going to grab my 'Line Chart 2'. And drag him just above. You can see, it snaps into place. Nice. Great. So, the reveal. We'll start at the beginning here, and we're going to add a mask. We did this when we did the Bring Your Own Laptop logo. We grabbed the rectangle tool, and as long as we have this line, this 'Line 2' selected-- I'm going to rename them to make it easier. This one here is the line. This one here is going to be the background, or 'Backgroun'. I'm okay with that. Line. Make sure it's a rectangle, and what's going to happen is-- I'm going to draw a rectangle. That shows the whole thing. That's cool.

Now what I'm going to do is animate it, so here's my mask, it's touched this line here, I'm going to twirl it down. And what I'd like to do is, I'm going to play around with the 'Mask Path'. So I'm going to-- I'm still here, and I'm going to click on this one, set a key frame. And at the beginning here, what I'd like to do is, I'm going to grab my black arrow. And I'm going to double click it. I'm going to shrink it in here, it's all gone. You can kind of see what it's going to do, right? After a while it will go, zoom. I'm going to animate with separate key frames, so at the beginning, it's going to be there. I'll move along. How far? To about half a second. I'm going to double click the edge. Then, let me see if I can grab it, a little bit tough. I'm going to grab the one that's pointing out here. It doesn't work, you might have to zoom in, but that's all right.

So I'm going to get it to go about there. Right on that line there. Great! Then I'm going to get it to pause for a few frames. This is just because I like it. So, to pause, remember, got this key frame, and I want another key frame right there. The key frames can maybe start moving stuff, or if you don't want to move it, like I don't, I want it to pause, click on this guy. Then it's going to go out to a whole second. I'll tidy this up in terms of timing later on. We need to kind of see it going, and then mess around with it. So, now I'm going to do it, double click. Get it to around this one. Great. Then after half a second, I'm going to get it to pause. We're going to go a step and repeat this one. So you can scream your head now, and do it all. I'm going to double click it. Now it's going to be out here. Move along here.

Just so you know, all these videos that you are watching, you can often, at the bottom right, switch out to double speed. So if you find me a bit slow, or I work a bit slow, double click it, and you can watch me at 1.5 speed, or 2 speed. But, it goes fast. So there's my pause. And I want it to go out to here. And I'm going to double click, try and work as fast as I can now. Add my sound effects, you. Pause. Go along, half a second. Double click. Probably I shouldn't do the whole thing, I should be testing as I go along, just to see what it looks like, but I'm pretty confident, I'm pretty awesome. Double click. Remember, it's going to go all the way across here. Cool. And then, let's go and look around. Might have to shorten my timer, but let's give it a go. It's not going to-- The pause's probably aren't long enough. Not very long enough. Maybe not. So what we'll do is, probably, all of these guys, unfortunately, I'm going to move out. Move out. And I'm guessing these here. You could be a bit more. Be precise with them, by counting frames; I'm not. Is it better? There's a bit of a pause now.

Also, what I'm going to do is, play at the easings, so I'm going to select them all, right click, 'Velocity'... I'm going to go to '70'. I keep it at 70, you can pick anything from that easing. I picked 70 because it looks good. Now we're going, it feels nicer. All right, so there's my little lines here. And that is how-- pretty much, they're all done.

I'm going to do a bar graph in the next one, and that's just a similar sort of method, but you do design animation per bar, which takes a little bit long time, but you can animate a bar graph really pretty that way. What we're going to do, just to finish this one off, is-- I hit 'Save'-- and I'm going to do one last little thing. I'm going to twirl this up, so it all looks nice and tidy. And we're going to add some circles, that are kind of up here. So what I'm going to do, back here at the time line, I may be at this one here. Now, to line up with key frames, what I'm going to do is twirl that line. And I'm going to make sure that I get to this one here. I'm holding 'Shift' so it snaps there. So I know I'm at the right stage. And I want a circle to appear. So I'm going to grab the 'Ellipse' tool, and we're going to have nothing selected down here. Click off, and draw a circle.

So, drawing a circle-- now we're going to scale in and out, and this is going to highlight some weird stuff. So if I click on 'Transform', can you see, there's my circle, but there's the center of its rotation, or it's anchor point, sorry. So if I can scale it up and down, can you see, it actually scales from there. Just really weird. So whenever you're drawing something, and you want to start animating any of these 'Transform' properties, grab this tool here. This is called your 'Pan Behind' tool, or 'Anchor Point' tool. Can you see it there? Grab him, grab this guy. You can try and hover around, try and make sure he gets into the center here. You'll never get it. Watch this, if I drag it, and hold down the 'Command' key, can you see, it's snapped in there, snapped into the different size. Hold down 'Command' key on a Mac, or 'Control' on a PC to make sure the center of rotation is in the right point.

Now what I want to do is, I'm going to set 'Scale', and I'm going to set that to '0%'. And then I'll use PgDn, just to jump across a couple of frames. You could drag your play heads, its fine, so PgDn, maybe '3 frames'. I might have to play with some timings afterwards, that's okay. And now I'm going to 'Scale' it up to maybe '120%'. And then I'm going to cross 2 more frames, and get it back to '100', So this is going to do this kind of-- Can you see it got a little bigger, and then protracted back, and if we sex it up with one of this, 'Velocity'. I might turn that down now that the 'Velocity' is a little lower. Nice. Let's see how he does. Nice.

So what I want to do is-- play, get to there. In terms of the timing, I'm going to drag this back a little bit, because I want to get to there. Before it even gets in there, I want to have this place, I'm going to drag it back a little bit. What we can do is, this here, because it's 0% scale, obviously it doesn't mean anything, but when I'm lining things up I can make it a little visually nice, if I line this up. Doesn't really matter if that was there or not because that thing doesn't appear. But what's going to happen now, is when I twirl this up, and I go-- rename this thing, and I call this 'Points'. Yes, 'Point'. I can copy and paste that layer now. Can you see, it makes it a little bit easier to align things up.

Now, cool other new shortcut. There is a shortcut sheet you can download, kind of a cheat sheet that I've got at the end of this video, but I'm going to give you little bits as we go along. Under 'Line', I want to find out where the key frames are. It's not hard, I can drag this down, on another mask, but say things are all twirled up. So I twirl it down, I can't find the key frames, I can see the black. So nice easy trick is to select this and hit 'U' on the keyboard. It only opens up the layers with key frames. And head here again, it closes it. So, doesn't really matter what you're doing, it opens and closes it. Same with 'Point 2'. Can you see, it only opens it up in scale. Even though if I close it up and open it up again, there's all these other things. U's just a super handy shortcut. We're going to start using more of this in this course.

So, here he is there, I want to find, actually I'm going to topple them up. It's the line I want to see, I want to grab you. And I'm going to drag it. Actually, watch this, if I drag it along-- I was messing around with this tool here. I forgot about the 'Pan Behind' tool, it's still open. Watch this, I can scrub along all along, nothing changes. Key frame is still there, watch. So I'm going to 'undo' all of that. And what I want to do is make sure I'm on the black arrow. So now when I drag it, hold 'Shift' to snap it to it. Perfect.

Now, when I play the fun game of-- zoom in a little bit here. Let's first of all test it. Let's go to 'Fit'. Let's see what it looks like. Why can't I see my key frames? Twirl down, here they are. It's because he's in the right, here at the exact same spot. Good work, Dan. So I'm going to grab this one, and I am going to-- You can either drag, it's quite hard to drag these things. Just to avoid the target at the center. There he goes there. Nice work. Cool. And I'm going to do the same, copy paste. Drag this along. To where? Just a little bit before then. I have it selected. I'm going to drag it. Come across to there. Because he's at 0% he's only going to get a bit tiny. And he appears there. Great. So-- Okay. And step and repeat, it's still following them. All right, we're back. That is a very cool little graph. Maybe a bit slow. We could play around with the timing. Ah, I like it. Let's hit 'Save'.

And that is how you do infographics. We're going to do some Pie charts where it's slightly different. But often, lots of these infographics we use, specially doing graphs and things, it is just a lot of masking, where things already exist like a line. You unmask it, or reveal it. Then you add little flourishes. So if we consider flourishes, these little dots, just kind of sex it up a little bit. All right, that's it for this one. I'll see you in the next video.